MONitoring Agents using a Large Integrated Services Architecture

MonALISA, which stands for Monitoring Agents using a Large Integrated Services Architecture, has been developed over
the last four years by Caltech and its partners with the support of the U.S. CMS software and computing program.

The framework is based on Dynamic Distributed Service Architecture and is able to provide complete monitoring, control
and global optimization services for complex systems.

The MonALISA system is designed as an ensemble of autonomous multi-threaded, self-describing agent-based subsystems which
are registered as dynamic services, and are able to collaborate and cooperate in performing a wide range of information
gathering and processing tasks. These agents can analyze and process the information, in a distributed way, to provide
optimization decisions in large scale distributed applications. An agent-based architecture provides the ability to
invest the system with increasing degrees of intelligence, to reduce complexity and make global systems manageable in
real time. The scalability of the system derives from the use of multithreaded execution engine to host a variety of
loosely coupled self-describing dynamic services or agents and the ability of each service to register itself and then
to be discovered and used by any other services, or clients that require such information. The system is designed to
easily integrate existing monitoring tools and procedures and to provide this information in a dynamic, customized,
self describing way to any other services or clients.

The MonALISA framework is a fully distributed service system with no single point of failure and it provides: